“I cannot accept the part about the fishing license. The Fish and Game has taken an unjust and patronizing step,” said Yurok Tribal Chairman Thomas O’Rourke Sr. “No one can separate these resources from our culture.”

Yurok Tribal Member Richard Myers cleans mussels inside of Patrick's Point State Park. The Park does not recognize the rights of indigenous tribes who depend on gathering there to perpetuate their lifeways.

(Stockton) The California Fish and Game Commission accepted a preferred alternative Wednesday, June 29 that failed to affirm traditional tribal gathering in the North Coast Study Region of the Marine Life Protection Act (MLPA) Initiative.

According to Option 1, tribal members would have to use a state fishing license in addition to a Tribal ID for those sixteen or older and be limited by state regulations.

“I cannot accept the part about the fishing license. The Fish and Game has taken an unjust and patronizing step,” said Yurok Tribal Chairman Thomas O’Rourke Sr. “No one can separate these resources from our culture.”

Option 1 states “tribal gathering to continue in SMCAs (not SMRs), by specific tribal users, where a factual record can be established that shows ancestral take or tribal gathering practices by a federally-recognized tribe in that specific MPA (marine protected area), and by allowing only those tribes to take specified species with specified gear types.”

The Northern California Tribal Chairmen’s Association and the Inter-Tribal Sinkyone Wilderness Council, which represent all of the recognized tribes in the study region, proposed a motion that would have affirmed traditional tribal harvest managed by individual Tribal governments.

The motion states: “Consistent with the tribal gathering general concepts described in Option 1…Traditional, non-commercial tribal uses shall be allowed to continue unimpeded within the proposed SMCAs and SMRMs in the MLPA’s North Coast Study Region for all federally recognized tribes that can establish that they have practiced such uses within a specific SMCA or SMRMA.”

The motion was supported by California Assembly Member Wesley Chesbro and California Senator Noreen Evans.

Northern California Tribes, which have much more stringent marine harvest guidelines than the state, depend on coastal resources for ceremonial, medicinal and subsistence purposes. In other words, having safe access is indivisible from tribal culture.

The Marine Life Protection Act (MLPA) Initiative is a public-private partnership between the State of California and a hand-full of private foundations to implement the Marine Life Protection Act (MLPA), which was signed into law in 1999.

Throughout the process there have been proposals to aggressively reject existing native rights. There were also proposals to support Native rights such as the North Coast Regional Stakeholder Group’s Unified Proposal.

The 28 member stakeholder group, comprised of fishing industry representatived, environmental groups and tribes, was the only stakeholder group in the entire MLPA process to develop a singular proposal. The Unified Proposal is supported by 41 city and county governments, tribes, conservation groups and fishing organizations.

“We’ve said from the beginning tribal rights are nonnegotiable,” Chairman O’Rourke Sr. said. “We’ve said that because we are in charge of our destiny.”

The amendment and preferred alternative for marine protected areas will now be vetted through the California Environmental Quality Act (CEQA).

The Yurok Tribe, the largest tribe in California, has 5,500 members. The Tribe’s ancestral territory runs eighty-three miles along the California coastline from the Little River to Damnation Creek. To the east the Tribe’s ancestral lands reach above the Klamath River’s confluence with the Trinity River. For more information about the Yurok Tribe, please visit http://www.yuroktribe.org.